Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television

By Daniel LaChance and Paul Kaplan

"Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised." Most of us have encountered this warning while watching television at some point. It is typically attached to a brand of reality crime TV that Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance call "crimesploitation": spectacles designed to entertain mass audiences by exhibiting "real" criminal behavior and its consequences. This book examines their enduring popularity in American culture. Analyzing the structure and content of several popular crimesploitation shows, including Cops, Dog: The Bounty Hunter, and To Catch a Predator, as well as newer examples like Making a Murderer and Don't F**K with Cats, Kaplan and LaChance highlight the troubling nature of the genre: though it presents itself as ethical and righteous, its entertainment value hinges upon suffering. Viewers can imagine themselves as deviant and ungovernable like the criminals in the show, thereby escaping a law-abiding lifestyle. Alternatively, they can identify with law enforcement officials, exercising violence, control, and "justice" on criminal others. Crimesploitation offers a sobering look at the depictions of criminals, policing, and punishment in modern America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781503631748

Book preview

Crimesploitation

Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television

Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaplan, Paul, 1968– author. | LaChance, Daniel, 1979– author.

Title: Crimesploitation : crime, punishment, and pleasure on reality television / Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance.

Other titles: Cultural lives of law.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Series: The cultural lives of law | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021062079 (print) | LCCN 2021062080 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503613683 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631731 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503631748 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: True crime television programs—United States—History and criticism. | Reality television programs—United States—History and criticism. | Crime on television. | Punishment on television.

Classification: LCC PN1992.8.T78 K37 2022 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.T78 (ebook) | DDC 791.45/6556—dc23/eng20220302

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062079

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062080

Cover design: Michel Vrana

Cover photos: iStock

The Cultural Lives of Law

Edited by Austin Sarat

For our mentors:

Elaine Tyler May, Lary May, and Austin Sarat (DL)

Kitty Calavita, Simon Cole, Valerie Jenness, and Richard Leo (PK)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Disciplined and the Delinquent

1. Humilitainment, Inc.: Policing the Criminal on Primetime

2. Watching the Night Creatures: Crimesploitation and Boredom

3. Cuffs of Love: Punishment and Redemption in Crimesploitation

4. Middlebrow Crimesploitation

Epilogue: W(h)ither Crimesploitation?

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

It takes a village to raise a book, and we are grateful for the feedback of colleagues who offered feedback and advice on this project at various stages: Michelle Brown, Hank Fradella, Stuart Henry, Caley Horan, Alex Milla, Ryan Murphy, Keramet Reiter, Alessandra Rellini, and Colin Reynolds. Particular thanks go to Renée Cramer and Ashley Rubin, who read and commented on multiple drafts of the manuscript. Michelle Lipinski’s editorial enthusiasm for this project in its earliest stages convinced us to turn it into a book and submit it to the Cultural Lives of the Law series at Stanford University Press. We are grateful for the support of the press and, in particular, Sunna Juhn and Marcela Maxfield. Emory undergraduate students Sueda Polat and Jenna Yun provided exceptional research assistance. Finally, we appreciate the ongoing intellectual and logistical support we receive from our colleagues in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University and the Department of History at Emory University.

Parts of the introduction and chapters 2 and 4 have been published elsewhere in different forms. Some of the material on To Catch a Predator appeared in Law, Culture, and Humanities 15, no. 1 (2019): 127–50. Some of the material on Making a Murderer appeared in Crime, Media, Culture 16, no. 1 (2020): 81–96. We introduced crimesploitation as a term in contributions to The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice (2017) and The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology (2017).

Our work has benefited from feedback we received from colleagues at the Annual Meetings of the American Criminology Society, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, the Law and Society Association, and the Western Society for Criminology. Finally, this work benefited from financial support given by Emory University College of Arts and Sciences and the Princeton University Program in Law and Public Affairs.

Our friends and family sustained us through the years we’ve worked on this project. Daniel thanks Dana Bontemps, Joey Brakefield, Rachel Buchberger, Nick Eigen, Nihad Farooq, Andy Grover, Jeff Hnilicka, Karen and John LaChance, Amanda Mahnke, Todd Michney, Melissa Miness, Annie Murray-Close, Zak Taylor, Dan Weiner, and Ali John Zarrabi. Paul thanks Peter M. Blair, Dimitri A. Bogazianso, Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Peri Good, Valerie Hastie, David Jancsics, Jasper Kaplan, Jeffrey P. Kaplan, Julie O’Connor-Quinn, Charlie Pizarro, SMART and We Agnostics Buddies, and Sylvia Valenzuela.

Introduction

The Disciplined and the Delinquent

When the television show Cops celebrated its five-hundredth episode in 2002, reporters asked its creator to reflect on the show’s success. John Langley, who left a career as a philosopher to develop the show, explained that network executives initially balked at what he pitched to them. A show with no host or narrator, comprised solely of footage shot by camera operators shadowing actual police officers? Audiences would not know what to make of it. And police agencies—notoriously insular organizations—would never subject themselves to such scrutiny. Nonetheless, the fledgling Fox Television Network decided to take a risk. The show became an immediate hit. Airing the dirty laundry of society, as Langley put it, Cops drew up to 11 million viewers a week, including celebrity fans like Sylvester Stallone and Cher.¹

When it premiered in 1989, Cops marked the dawn of a new age of reality television—unscripted, formulaic programs that portray people acting as themselves—doing their jobs, vying in weeks-long competitions, or simply living and socializing with one another.² By the early twenty-first century, Cops was competing with dozens of reality television shows that promised audiences unfiltered access to scenes of crime and punishment, from novice police officers chasing burglary suspects through backyards to middle-aged men planning sexual liaisons with underage adolescents to drug-addicted mothers fleeing bounty hunters.³ Contemplating the remarkable success of Cops, Langley pointed to something profound beneath the head-cracking, obscenity-laced melees he aired on American television screens.⁴ Cops, he told an interviewer, was an existential variety show with authentic décor.⁵

This book takes Langley’s off-the-cuff musing seriously. Evoking the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, existential is not a word typically associated with reality television. Trashy more readily comes to mind. But as we hope to show, existential anxiety drives Cops and the many crimesploitation programs that followed in its footsteps. In the chapters that follow, we argue that these shows served as a window into the different, sometimes contradictory experience of life in a world that had undergone—and continues to undergo—massive social and economic changes. Those changes made many Americans feel culturally and financially insecure. These programs offered them different ways of understanding and managing that insecurity.

The Cultural Road to Crimesploitation

We call the reality television programs that are the focus of this book crimesploitation because they blend key elements of two long-standing genres: true crime texts, which dramatize actual criminal cases investigated and prosecuted by authorities, and exploitation films, which satisfy the voyeuristic desire to witness the violation of taboos.⁶

Broadly defined, true crime refers to texts that turn actual crimes, criminal trials, or punishments into stories that are consumed by a wide public. Such texts can run the gamut from highbrow fare that aims to make lasting aesthetic and thematic contributions to American letters to formulaic, lowbrow productions that aim to entertain mass audiences. They often share a common thread. In them, criminality appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place.⁷ The earliest true crime took the form of accounts of crimes and executions that circulated in pamphlet form as early as the sixteenth century in Europe.⁸ Americans have, as we might expect, long consumed these texts. One of the earliest bestsellers in colonial North America was Mary Rowlandson’s salacious 1682 account of her experience in captivity at the hands of Native Americans.⁹ Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans could find written accounts of crime and punishment in widely circulating print materials. Eighteenth-century broadsides—cheap mass-produced documents—chronicled the crimes and executions of murderers. Nineteenth-century theaters performed plays based on actual murder cases. When a Methodist minister was put on trial for the 1832 murder of factory worker Sarah Maria Cornell in Fall River, Massachusetts, accounts of the crime and its aftermath became the source for no fewer than three different plays.¹⁰ Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, tabloid-style newspapers melodramatically covered sensational criminal trials that periodically gripped a city’s or the nation’s imagination.¹¹

With the introduction of new entertainment technologies, true crime proliferated in new forms. Radio programs of the 1930s like True Detective Mysteries, Homicide Squad, Calling All Cars, and Treasury Agent turned actual police files into radio dramas. Big-screen police procedurals in the 1940s were often fictionalized versions of cases investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local police agencies. Filmed on location, they sought to convey a sense of reality by adopting a documentary look—a gritty realism.¹² By the late 1960s one of the most popular shows on television was The FBI. Forty million Americans a week tuned into ABC to watch a show about a group of heroic, fictional FBI agents solving crimes inspired by actual FBI cases.

Over time, law enforcement increasingly perceived benefits in collaborating with the creators of true crime texts. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover served as a consultant for The FBI, turning to the media to burnish his agency’s public image. In exchange for his cooperation, the show’s producers ceded editorial control to Hoover and his second-in-command, Clyde Tolson, who vetted scripts and declared some material off limits.¹³ Authorities also sought to transform true crime productions into opportunities to expand their surveillance powers. The FBI often ended with a segment that introduced audiences to a fugitive and asked them to contact the authorities. In the 1970s authorities’ efforts to capitalize on the popularity of true crime stories took a turn toward the local, as regional news stations and police departments worked together to produce crimestoppers, segments that reenacted unsolved crimes and then solicited viewers’ help in bringing the perpetrators to justice. When the first contemporary crimesploitation shows emerged in the late 1980s, two of them, Unsolved Mysteries (1987) and America’s Most Wanted (1988), revived a well-established tradition of entertaining audiences with stories of crime and then asking for their assistance in capturing the culprits.¹⁴

If crimesploitation reflects true crime’s longstanding preoccupation with criminal justice, its quasi-pornographic qualities mark its connection to twentieth-century exploitation films. From 1920 to 1960 enterprising filmmakers made countless cheap films aimed at satisfying audiences’ desire for knowledge about off-limits topics. Cultural historian Eric Schaefer identifies several key features of these films. First, they focused on forbidden topics, like sexual promiscuity or illicit drug use, promising viewers shocking truths and fearless frankness. Second, they often displaced taboo desires onto exotic others, people who seemed racially, sexually, and morally foreign to middle-class audiences. One iteration of the genre took viewers on journeys into dangerous jungles in far-flung locales where they could encounter topless native girls (California actors), gorillas (men in ape suits), and scenes of cannibalism (faked). Finally, while their goal was to titillate, exploitation films pretended to have a pedagogical purpose, presenting themselves as warnings about threats to middle-class decency. Square-ups, statements about the social or moral ill the film claimed to combat, would appear before a film began, offering a respectable reason to watch the film. For example, after Congress passed the Harrison Narcotic Act (1914), which banned opium and cocaine at the national level, a slew of exploitation films presented themselves as cautionary tales, depicting middle- or upper- class individuals abusing a variety of substances and eventually becoming derelicts.¹⁵

The classical era eventually gave way to fictional exploitation films that were less concerned with maintaining a veneer of respectability. Indeed, they advertised themselves as offering thrills that audiences would not find elsewhere. As film scholar Calum Waddell notes, modern exploitation films capitalized on social anxieties of the 1960s and 1970s by depicting facets of contemporary socio-political ‘taboo’: interracial sex, the insatiable female, a verité approach to torture and murder, African-American hypersexuality and revolt. It was in this era that media critics devised a versatile way to describe these sorts of texts, making a portmanteau out of the word exploitation and the taboo object or scenario that was being exploited for mass consumption. The NAACP coined the term Blaxploitation to condemn exploitation films in the 1970s that, they charged, glorified black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters and super males with vast physical prowess but not cognitive skills.¹⁶ Other ’sploitations, like sexploitation, followed.¹⁷

Ideologically and aesthetically, the shows we study borrow much from exploitation films. Just as classical exploitation films offered audiences access to underworlds they would not normally encounter, crimesploitation offers audiences the opportunity to consume what they have been told is off limits. If junkies, primitive peoples, and female sex workers—prostitutes, strippers, burlesque women—populated classical exploitation, contemporary crimesploitation offers its own kaleidoscopic array of deviants, from hookers to gang-bangers to child molesters, who inspire both curiosity and revulsion. Episodes of Intervention offer close-up views of crack smoking. Bait Car regales viewers with the highs and lows of stealing a car and getting arrested for it. Lockup takes viewers into the bowels of maximum-security prisons. Other shows depict ordinary-seeming people engaging in forbidden behavior. A ride-along policing show, Alaska State Troopers, shows intoxicated snowmobile drivers stopped for drunk driving. And, like both classical and late twentieth-century exploitation films, these shows aim to create a sense of gritty verisimilitude for their viewers.¹⁸ The shaky movements of hand-held cameras, the grainy texture of surveillance footage, and uncomfortable close-ups all convey a sense of documentary immediacy that late twentieth-century exploitation films pioneered.¹⁹

While crimesploitation evolved out of long-standing elements of true crime and exploitation texts, it was also the product of a world in which it had become easier than ever to deliver gritty verisimilitude to audiences. As Mark Fishman and Gray Cavender note, new recording technologies like closed-circuit television surveillance cameras gave producers access to audio and visual recordings that their predecessors could only have dreamed of.²⁰ The gritty aesthetic that directors of true-crime movies sought to create by filming on location in the 1940s was now easily found in the home movies, security footage, and answering-machine recordings that producers could splice into these shows. Ride-along shows like Cops and Real Stories of the Highway Patrol were made possible by new production equipment like lightweight cameras and small lavalier microphones that allowed camera operators and participants in reality television programs the ability to work in police cruisers and run after police officers chasing suspects over fences and through backyards.²¹ Finally, new transmission and dissemination technologies, such as satellite networks and cable television channels, made it fast and easy for crimesploitation to be produced, transmitted, and consumed.²²

The Rise of the Neoliberal Carceral State

While crimesploitation drew from long-standing genres, it is best understood as a product of two historical developments in the late twentieth century: the rise of law and order politics and the neoliberal transformation of the American economy. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s conservatives associated a surge in violent crime with the social change that was transforming the nation during these years. In those decades, women, racial minorities, sexual minorities, and youth joined political movements aimed at ending their political and cultural subordination in American society. Within the span of a decade, activists had dismantled a legal regime of racial apartheid, loosened racist immigration laws, gained protections for women against employment discrimination, pressured the medical community to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness, and lowered the voting age to eighteen. To conservatives unsettled by social change, it was no coincidence that it was accompanied by a rise in violent crime. Crime was the consequence Americans were facing for abandoning a way of life that, in their minds, had preserved order in the United States. Nowhere was this association between crime and social change more evident than in the movement for racial equality. As cities burned during uprisings in the summers of the late 1960s, Black liberation became synonymous with Black crime for many white Americans. With the rallying cry of law and order, politicians called for a repressive state response to crime. Order, Richard Nixon proclaimed in a campaign ad in 1968, was Americans’ first civil right.²³ Many Americans agreed. With fear of violent crime on the rise, a more punitive approach to the crime problem began to take hold. Fighting poverty, lowering unemployment, and expanding economic opportunities were out. Surveillance, stop-and-frisk, and long prison sentences were in.

The results of this new law and order strategy were stupendous and, as we will see, represented a counterrevolution against the social changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, the American prison population tripled to about 600,000 people. It would go on to expand massively over the course of the 1990s, doubling again to 1.2 million. By the late 2000s 800 per 100,000 Americans were incarcerated on any given day in the United States—a full 1 percent of the adult population.²⁴ Many more found themselves navigating a labyrinthine network of institutions designed to manage people on probation, parole, or other forms of noncustodial supervision.

The punitive shift in crime policy was accompanied by an equally dramatic revolution in economic policy. As fear of crime increasingly gripped the nation in the 1970s, the economy began to fail. Economic growth shrank, while inflation skyrocketed—a development that puzzled economists. Since the New Deal influential policymakers had held that the appropriate response to economic decline was the maintenance of a strong regulatory state and the willingness of government to engage in deficit spending to put more money in the pockets of consumers and stimulate economic growth.²⁵ But such policies seemed to be failing, and elites embraced a more libertarian approach to the economy, one that deregulated enterprise, cut corporate and individual taxes, privatized the provision of many public services, and shrank welfare spending. This approach, known as neoliberalism, espoused a faith in free markets. Coalescing under Ronald Reagan, neoliberal policies effectively shifted—rather than eradicated—the insecurity created by the economic crises of the 1970s. Tax rates on corporations and the wealthy plummeted, and the nation’s gross domestic product began growing again, enriching those at the top of the economic spectrum.²⁶ But their prosperity did not trickle down to those in lower income brackets, as neoliberal economists suggested it might. By the late 1980s, when the first crimesploitation shows began airing, Americans without a college degree had seen their real wages (the amount of money they earned per hour, adjusted for inflation) decline significantly since the 1970s. Nonunion work in the service industries grew while high-paying unionized jobs declined in response to automation and offshoring of manufacturing.²⁷ For those who had stepped into the middle classes during the middle decades of the twentieth century—disproportionately white, working-class men and women—the future did not seem as economically secure for their children as it once did. And for those who had hoped to follow in their footsteps, a middle-class existence increasingly seemed out of reach.

Like earlier forms of capitalism, neoliberalism was shaped by racial hierarchies and worked to undermine Black progress in ways that had both economic and carceral consequences.²⁸ Concerted efforts to remedy Black economic inequality, most notably Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s, had sought to offer some assistance to a population that had historically